August 8, 2014 AT 12:25 pm

A Fish Plays Pokemon

If you missed Twitch plays Pokemon: First, how tragic. Second, you can currently watch a betta play Pokemon. It is a riff of the “infinite monkey theorem” which essentially claims that Pokemon will eventually be beaten even if it is played by a fish. Here is a statement from the creators, who are a part of the HackNY Fellows Class of 2014 and created the feed in a 24-hour hacking project:

Hi everyone! Welcome to our stream where our fish, Grayson Hopper, plays a Pokemon game. Unfortunately, we don’t have a dedicated light for Grayson at night as he lives in a tiny dorm room and we would rather not sleep with the light on. 🙁 But in the future we will be getting him a dedicated lamp and improving the quality of the stream to include recent inputs determined by the motion tracking. Things can move a little slow, so another option we’re considering is making the system distributed where we have a site where you can provide a fish stream link and we’ll include it in the controlling.

Grayson has been playing for around 160 hours. Last time I checked, Grayson made it out of the house! Before that, he had acquired his first Pokemon, a charmander named AAAABBK and defeated his first opponent, the rival’s squirtle!